Murakami, Mishra and Morning Jog

I just finished South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is widely celebrated as a brilliant new writer and has become wildly popular these days. He has a very different style — an almost childlike voice, very simple and very ordinary yet profound. Sample this (while commenting on Disney film The Live Desert the protagonist watched as a child):

Our world’s exactly the same. Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end every one of them dies. The die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That’s how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end it doesn’t make a bit of a difference. All that remains is a desert.

Earlier, he also described the words of a song the protagonist liked as a child:

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue
It isn’t very hard to do.

The story is about Hajime, who is just settling down in life with a loving wife and two daughters (after a very disturbing adulthood), but his childhood sweetheart Shimamoto returns in his life. Shimamoto is seductive, excruciatingly beautiful and enigma personified. He had never been able to get Shimamoto out of his mind and her returns rocks his relatively peaceful existence.

After finishing Murakami, I shifted to (Sudhir) Mishra. I had been enamoured by the trailers of Khoya Khoya Chand, and Soha Ali Khan is “oh-so-pretty” anyway. All through the movie, I kept comparing it with Om Shanti Om (which I had recently watched). The only comparison I can make is KKC is character and OSO is caricature. Of course, they are completely different genres and it is unfair to compare, but still, that is what I thought of. Both are very similar in the underlying theme — the movie industry far back. But completely different in they way the same thing is portrayed. KKC, I would highly recommend — a very well made film, of two artists in the industry, how they are exploited, how they fall in love, how they exploit each other, crumble and finally triumph. No khitpit, no khichkhich, just a good movie.